Form 990 for tax year 2024

Totals

Total revenue

$282,591

Total expenses

$378,656

Contributions and grants received

$74,229

Grants paid

$75

Program service revenue

$208,346

Investment income

$16

Other revenue

$0

Total assets, end of year

$196,759

Total liabilities, end of year

$3,446

Net assets or fund balances, end of year

$193,313

Program services expenses (Part IX)

$342,887

Management and general expenses

$25,161

Fundraising expenses

$10,608

Program service expenses (Part III)

$342,887

Program services were 90.6% of total expenses calculated — Part IX's program-services column over total expenses, both as filed.

Line items

Every line the filer filed in Parts VIII, IX and X, as filed and in filed order. Blank columns are left out, and the lines are not forced to add up to the totals above.

Mission and programs · 2024

• Production Services In 2024, Talking Eyes Media (TEM) marked its 21st anniversary and TEM continued to share our ongoing projects while pursuing several new initiatives. TEM was also honored to have Executive Director Julie Winokur named one of 76 artists to be awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. This competitive prize acknowledges an outstanding contribution to the arts in New Jersey.Talking Eyes Medias project Newest Americans continues to be a valuable resource for educators and the general public, and TEM continued to deploy the Newark Story Bus to events in the city of Newark. This multi-year digital media project examines immigration and American identity. Developed in partnership with Rutgers University-Newark and VII Photo, Newest Americans produces short films, radio pieces, written essays, exhibitions and public events that explore the lives and communities, trials and aspirations of Americas diverse immigrant population. The project was awarded Best Online Storytelling Project in 2021 by Pictures of the Year International.Through Newest Americans, TEM has developed partnerships with Audible, Newark Museum of Art, Newark Public Library, NJPAC and Newark Symphony Hall to share our media and engage in conversations with local thought leaders. The goal has been to activate and collaborate with the anchor cultural institutions in the city to provide compelling content to a broad audience.With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Newest Americans created the Newark Story Bus. This retrofitted former school bus serves as a mobile media lab to collect stories throughout the city at community events, schools and businesses. It is also used to educate students on basic media skills. In 2023, TEM partnered with Audible to activate the bus at two community events: one geared toward local entrepreneurs and one focused on senior citizens. From these activations, TEM produced short videos that highlighted the participants stories and shared the voices of Newark residents with a larger audience. TEM also activated the bus in partnership with Lives in Translation, a Rutgers-based program that engages students in working as translators.Through TEM's content from the bus, TEM produced a series of short videos featuring Newark residents who have first-hand experience of the Great Migration. This series of six animated shorts was released in early 2024 for Black History Month. The shorts reveal family histories that show how the Great Migration is not part of the distant past, but very present in the neighborhoods, art, music, food and culture of present-day Newark.The TEM film, Bring It to The Table, continues to be licensed by universities across the country through our distribution partner, Kanopy. This film addresses political partisanship and each citizens responsibility in bridging the divide. As a result of this work, the TEM Executive Director, Julie Winokur was invited to give a keynote presentation at the Madeira School in Virginia in 2024.TEMs film, The Sacrifice Zone, had ten screenings during the year, all followed by engaging discussions around environmental justice, structural racism, and waste removal. The film follows a group of activists in Newarks Ironbound neighborhood as they fight for clean air. TEM invites environmental justice activists who appear in the film to engage in post-screening discussions. The screenings have been hosted by grassroots organizers, concerned citizens and educators. This work builds on TEM's over 50 screenings in the past two years, as well as touring the film festival circuit. As of this year, the film has been acquired for the permanent collections of 16 higher education libraries.TEM produced six videos for the James Irvine Leadership Awards in 2024 featuring nonprofits in California that address black maternal health, library services, Native American food sovereignty, and diversity in the film industry.In early 2024, with a grant from Amplifier, TEM traveled to Georgia to ask young voters about the issues they cared about and their perspectives on the upcoming elections. TEM interviewed, filmed and photographed over a dozen participants in a voter engagement boot camp hosted by the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition. TEM developed partnerships with local and national organizations like the ACLU of Georgia and Alliance for Youth Action to identify their strategic needs. We edited our interviews into a series of short videos for social media and offered them to our partners to help mobilize young voters. The videos received thousands of views, were used in college voting toolkits, and circulated through newsletters.TEM returned to Georgia to interview and photograph young conservative voters. This resulted in an online publication in Mother Jones Magazine. The Instagram video for this story spurred a robust online engagement and over 50,000 views.American Sketches is a new long-term project that we are producing that explores the fabric of America in this deeply divided and explosive time in our history. In 2024, TEM returned to Eagle Pass, Texas, and the Mississippi Delta to develop their relationships with local characters while diving deeper into these iconic places. In Eagle Pass, which is located on the Rio Grande, mass migration overshadows a small town where over 95% of the residents have Mexican roots. In the Mississippi Delta, TEM is profiling two farming families, one Black and one White, whose experience of the land and their place in it has been shaped by race.Selected vignettes from American Sketches were published in the 2024 issue of The Raw Society magazine, a publication dedicated to sharing compelling and important photographic stories. The issue features 306 pages filled with photography and in-depth storytelling from around the world. The magazine won 1st place in the Self-Published Book category of the 2024 International Photography awards.Smithsonian magazine published TEM's latest work on heat stress, highlighting the worlds first Chief Heat Officer, Jane Gilbert, and Miami-Dade Countys efforts to support a broad coalition of partners who are working hard to keep the city cool. In Miami, where temperatures run in the 90s for months at a time, the heat season now extends through October. An Extreme Heat Action Plan offers coalition partners guidance for how to inform, prepare and protect residents from rising temperatures. This plan, along with other efforts, TEM reported in Smithsonian Magazine, offer a model for other cities to follow.Last year, TEM helped launch 1 in 6, a collaborative project that brings together photographers from around the world to put a human face on aging. By 2030, 1 in 6 people on the planet will be over 60 years old. To date, this project has engaged 80 professional photographers from 42 countries, and their work has appeared in several international publications to highlight different aspects and cultural approaches to an aging population. The project will generate an archive of tremendous historical significance.For over a decade, TEM has worked with the La Isla Foundation to tell the story of how extreme heat increases kidney disease. Our film PREP for Change was one of seven films selected for the final round entries in the International Society of Nephrology (ISN) Community Film Event. Films selected honored patients, celebrated healthcare providers, and promoted kidney health awareness.

  Expenses $342,887

• Permissions Permissions or licensing fees grant the right to republish photos, video and text from TEM projects.

• Honoraria Talking Eyes staff and contributors received $5500 in honoraria to present Talking Eyes projects to diverse audiences. Over the past year, our Executive Director, Julie Winokur, and the protagonists from the film presented The Sacrifice Zone at 10 in-person screenings, which were followed by robust post-screening discussion. Julie also presented a keynote address about Bring It to the Table at the Madeira School in Virginia.

• Streaming Sales Talking Eyes Medias (TEM'S) films sell predominantly to educational institutions, libraries, colleges, universities, and the community based organizations. TEM's titles include The Sacrifice Zone, Bring It to The Table, Aging in America, and The Sandwich Generation. TEM's films earned over $4000 in streaming license fees from various organizations.

• Web TEMs projects are all available via the web. The TEM project Newest Americans had 45,000 page views in 2024 and TEM films were seen extensively through The New York Times, National Geographic, Time, and NPR online. The Sacrifice Zone website had over 8,000 page views. The Short films TEM produce for nonprofits and foundations are also available online through their websites as well as the TEM website.

• Education The TEM team taught multi-media skills to students around the world through online workshops. TEM also mentored several aspiring filmmakers over the course of the year, as well as several Rutgers student interns for Newest Americans.

• Exhibition and Screenings TEM films screened at film festivals, community events, conferences and classrooms across the country, most of which are available to the general public and most of which were streamed online.

As filed on the 2024 return. The filer continues this part on Schedule O, which is not shown here.

Listed in Part VII

Compensation is as filed in Part VII: reportable pay from this organization and from related organizations, other compensation, and hours per week. The total, marked calculated, is our sum of the three dollar columns, with a blank column counted as $0; the form itself has no total. On a Form 990-EZ the columns are Part IV's instead, and on a Form 990-PF Part VIII's — compensation, contributions to benefit plans, and expense account — and the total sums those.

Grants on this return

No itemized grants to organizations on this return.

Provenance

Return type

form_990

Tax year

2024

Filed

14 May 2025

IRS schema version

2024v5.1

Source object

202521349349306762

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